


You Are Lonely

by ialpiriel



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 23:16:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A character study of Gabriel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Lonely

**Author's Note:**

> This one was at least written during the day. It's shorter than Cas & Jimmy though. I wrote another sad.

You are lonely, and you have been lonely for a very long time.

At first you thought it would pass away - it was just a matter of accustoming yourself to the new silence in your head.

When a thousand years had passed, and still your loneliness hadn't, you took a vessel - the first of the angels to do so. You walked into the human camp - they were barely better than apes by then - and you performed miracles for them. They hailed you as a god, and in return you taught them music.

When they had begun to construct songs of their own, you left.

You were no longer needed.

You moved on to the next camp and did a repeat performance.

You made your way across Africa in this manner.

It did nothing to alleviate the loneliness - and so you turned to human pleasures.

Sex was the first. You'd had sex, once, in the third camp you visited. They had given you a wife and you had consummated the marriage, and you had let her leave when you were a few villages over - she had found a man she liked more. You didn't blame her. You had never been good company, not in heaven, not on earth. You still aren't. It's just easier to not like people.

You tried to fill the void with sex - first with women, which was okay, and then with men, which was also okay. You had three children: a son, who became a powerful warrior-hunter and overstepped his boundaries (you killed him before he reached age nineteen); and two daughters, one who became the founder of a religion, and traveled much the way you did and do and will (no one remembered her two hundred years down the line, as her teachings were absorbed by other religions and cultures), and one who stayed home and married a man and never gave birth, although she adopted those children orphaned by disease (she was a very good nurse).

The sex doesn't fill the gaping maw that yawns wider and wider in the depths of the soul you have begun to grow by dint of being around humans so long. Neither does being a family man, although you try to be a better father than your was. It's not difficult.

Next, you try to fill the loneliness with food.

You ping the humans you have sworn to keep vigil over fruit and vegetables from far-off continents and lands. They have made it to northern Africa by now, and have begun to create societies - family groups and marriage contracts, domestication, farming. They are becoming intelligent, and curious, and now you are no longer a god, but rather a magician. As soon as they start asking questions you can't or won't answer, you move on.

You find you have a sweet tooth that is unappeased by fruit and vegetables. For most of human history, you satisfy it with honey, but once you find sugar cane, you substitute that instead. This is the first thing that really begins to take the edge of the loneliness. You keep it mostly to yourself, and once the thrill of discovery has worn off, the loneliness comes back. You decide to find something else.

You get the idea when you see a child tell his little brother that if you ask the butcher for a bit of meat, he'll give it to you if you say a few nonsense words (the butcher is actually a helpful demons in disguise, the boy explains, and those words make him do whatever you want him to). The little brother does so, an gets chased off and spanked for his trouble. The older brother just laughs. No one is badly hurt.

You begin playing harmless tricks on children - an apple instead of a pomegranate, a piece of carved goat horn instead of an interesting rock. They love it, and soon you are doing elaborate pranks and telling fantastic stories around campfires.

They begin calling you trickster, and the reputation begins to alleviate the emptiness - for real, this time.

You become the quintessential trickster god, cause hell for every pantheon you can weasel yourself into. You become five dozen different people. You teach them what they need to be taught - that even the most reprehensible deeds have good results, that sometimes things have to be done, that just because someone is a dick means they're all bad. You still try not to get attached.

You don't realize just how lonely you still are until the apocalypse begins.

You try to convince the major players that it's stupid, that everyone should back down, but they don't listen. No one ever listened. There was a reason you left after all.

In truth, you are lonely again from the first time you meet the Winchester pothers - funny, you think, that the vessels should be named after guns, and it makes you remember that someone, somewhere, has a sense of humor - until the very last time you look at Lucifer. They're all just reminders, over and over and over, of who and what you left behind. More reminders of the fact you once again failed.

You are lonely up until the very moment your Grace burns wings into the floor of the Elysian Fields motel ballroom floor.

And then you are no longer.


End file.
